Limit excerpt by characters in Wordpress

Question

Right so this seems to have been asked a few times but I cannot seem to find definitive working answer.

Currently I am trying to limit my post title and post excerpt on my WP website.

I have managed to trim the titles by character using

function custom_trim_my_title( $title ) {
if ( strlen( $title ) >= 72 && ! is_singular() ) {
$title = substr( $title, 0, 72 ) . '...';
return $title;
}
return $title;
}
add_filter( 'the_title', 'custom_trim_my_title' );

And that seems to be working okay but I can't seem to get it to work for the excerpt.

I was using this word count:

function custom_excerpt_length( $length ) {
    return 20;
}
add_filter( 'excerpt_length', 'custom_excerpt_length', 999 );

But the longer words still made it look messy so I need a character count and have tried this:

add_filter('the_excerpt','excerpt_char_limit');
function excerpt_char_limit($e){
    return substr($e,0,50);
}

But it doesn't seem to work. Any help would be great.

Answer 1

Try using

add_filter('the_excerpt','excerpt_char_limit',999);

instead. It is just in case if some other filter prevents your filter. (999 means executing later than other filters)